green healthhttp://member.iftf.org/taxonomy/term/90/all
enEnvironmental Health Droneshttp://member.iftf.org/node/4119
http://member.iftf.org/node/4119#commentsdronesgreen healthThe Future NowHealth Horizons<p>Via <a href="&quot;http://blog.makezine.com/2012/01/27/news-from-the-future-drone-pilot-discovers-river-of-meat-blood/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+makezineonline+%28MAKE%29">Make Magazine</a> comes word of an aerial drone that inadvertently happened upon a meat packing plant in Dallas that was polluting a nearby river with pig blood. The disturbing finding points to something we should expect a lot more of, now that drones <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/technology/drones-with-an-eye-on-the-public-cleared-to-fly.html?pagewanted=all">have been approved for public flight</a> - namely, that we'll see citizens groups use unmanned vehicles as a form of citizen policing to monitor for all kinds of environmental health violations.
As reported in <a href="http://www.suasnews.com/2012/01/11389/dallas-meat-packing-plant-investigated-after-drone-images-reveal-pollution/">sUAS News</a>:
</p><blockquote>
A Dallas sUAS enthusiast testing his camera equiped drone noticed something awry with the images he had taken. Speaking to sUAS News he said.
I was looking at images after the flight that showed a blood red creek and was thinking, could this really be what I think it is?&nbsp; Can you really do that, surely not?&nbsp;
Whatever it is, it was flat out gross.&nbsp; Then comes the question of who do I report this to that can find out what it is and where it is coming from.&nbsp;
Search after search and even some phone calls and I am not finding anything on who to call until I find the Nation Response Center.&nbsp; With their website saying that they are “the sole national point of contact for reporting all oil, chemical, radiological, biological and etiological discharges into the environment, anywhere in the United States and its territories” this sure seems like the correct place to start.
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[img_assist|nid=4118|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=425|height=284]
The finding, which was by chance, reminds me of the concept of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?pagewanted=all">human flesh search engines</a> that have taken off in China, where, in response to crimes, people use social media to identify and shame people who commit crimes.
</p><blockquote>
Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.
</blockquote><p>
So what would environmental health drones do? Crowdsource environmental health detective work. Publicize, shame and boycott offenders.
(Thanks to colleagues <a href="http://www.iftf.org/user/41">Sean Ness</a> and <a href="http://www.iftf.org/user/1943">Nic Weidinger</a> for pointing me to the Make article.)</p>Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:47:21 +0000Bradley Kreit4119 at http://member.iftf.orgUnderstanding Fitness Desertshttp://member.iftf.org/node/4043
http://member.iftf.org/node/4043#commentsgreen healthhealth datahh2012The Future Nowwell-beingHealth Horizons<p>A couple months ago, <a href="http://www.good.is/post/in-fitness-deserts-working-out-isn-t-as-simple-as-hitting-the-gym/">Good had a great feature</a> about the idea of a fitness desert--essentially, a place where, due to some combination of environmental and social factors, getting out, walking around, and exercising is unusually difficult. As far as I can tell, the piece, by Alex Schmidt, is one of the first to use the term fitness desert--and I'd guess, in part, this is because coming up with any sort of clear definition of one is complex. In theory, the presence or absence of sidewalks, bike paths, parks, and gyms could all contribute to a definition, as could factors like crime rates.
Schmidt notes some of these competing definitions in her article:
</p><blockquote>
Like food deserts—areas where residents don’t have reliable access to fresh food—fitness deserts pose health challenges to millions of Americans, mostly low-income ones. A full 80 percent of census blocks do not have a park within a half-mile, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last year. Studies have shown that these disparities exist in cities all over the country, including Chicago, San Francisco and Washington D.C., complicating efforts to fight obesity in poor communities.
David Sloan, a professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California, says the difference in fitness opportunities between affluent and low-income areas are stark. While wealthy West Los Angeles has 70.1 acres of recreation or green space per 1,000 people, low-income South Los Angeles has 1.2 acres per 1,000. Meanwhile, private gyms are much more common in the more affluent areas. The recession has made it even more difficult to rely on public parks for fitness and recreation, as public resources earmarked for those spaces dwindle.
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In other words, there are a couple of key points: We know that areas where it's hard to exercise are bad for health; we also know that actually defining "hard to exercise" is, itself, no easy task at the moment.
But over the next decade, I think we'll have increasingly good tools to define complex and significant determinants of health--like fitness deserts. Already, relatively straightforward services like <a href="http://www.walkscore.com/how-it-works.shtml">walk score</a> offer some insight into how easy or hard it is to navigate a neighborhood--and layering that information with other environmental and social data is pretty feasible. It will, for example, be possible to start to answer questions like how the location of a park, or the presence of a gym, impacts exercise rates.
One of the <a href="http://www.iftf.org/HH2012ResearchAgenda">real opportunities to use information to enhance health</a> over the next decade will be to link these sorts of environmental definitions to health outcomes and behaviors to better understand the kinds of environments that impact health--and to develop some more targeted ways to use the environment to enhance health.
Put differently, despite <a href="http://www.iftf.org/node/3191">long-standing links between health and place</a>, one of the challenges to intervening through the environment is in identifying interventions that genuinely work--a challenge that may dissipate as we develop high-resolution tools to analyze and understand links between place and health.</p>Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:58:15 +0000Bradley Kreit4043 at http://member.iftf.orgInvesting in Local Communities to Improve Healthhttp://member.iftf.org/node/3989
http://member.iftf.org/node/3989#commentscontagion healthgreen healthlocalismThe Future NowHealth HorizonsThe New England Journal of Medicine has a <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1103216?query=featured_home">fascinating study</a> examining the effects of a low-income housing program impacted participants' health--the results of which suggest that, at least in many instances, improving the local neighborhoods where people live does far more to improve health than trying to tackle health problems on a case-by-case basis.
The study, led by University of Chicago Law Professor Jens Ludwig, looked at how health outcomes changed over time among people who moved out of high poverty neighborhoods, compared with those who didn't move. <a href="http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/20/change-your-neighborhood-improve-your-health/">Time's Healthland blog</a> concisely summarizes their findings:
<blockquote>
"The results suggest that over the long term, investments in improving neighborhood environments might be an important complement to medical care when it comes to preventing obesity and diabetes," says study author Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at University of Chicago
The HUD program, called Moving to Opportunity (MTO), wasn't originally focused on tracking people's health. It was designed to study the effect of the residential milieu on employment, income and education in families with children living in cities with a 40% or greater poverty rate. But Ludwig and his team were curious about how the rise in poverty in the U.S. has also mirrored the increase in obesity and diabetes and wondered, Could neighborhood and social factors influence health outcomes?
The current study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first to conduct a social experiment that allowed the comparison of such outcomes in families — in this case, low-income single mothers and their children living in public housing — who were randomly assigned to live in different economic environments. Families who volunteered to join MTO entered a lottery, which randomly put them in one of three groups: those who received vouchers to move to a less disadvantaged neighborhood (with a poverty rate of less than 10%), those who got vouchers to live wherever they chose, and those who did not receive any vouchers or additional assistance.
Because of the randomized design of the program, scientists knew they could track and correlate changes in living circumstances to later health outcomes like obesity or diabetes. Most of the families — who were from Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York — were followed for an average of 12 years, during which they answered survey questions about their neighborhood, jobs and health.
Among the 4,498 single moms who volunteered for the program, those who were assigned to move to lower-poverty areas were 19% less likely to have a BMI of 40 or higher, the cutoff for morbid obesity, and 22% less likely to have glucose levels typical of diabetes, compared with those who stayed in public housing.
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In other words, moving from an impoverished to a relatively healthier neighborhood lowered health risks by about one fifth--as effective as many medical interventions. What's also notable is that just providing a housing voucher--helping one family without doing much for the community--doesn't seem to measurably improve health.
Shared environmental and social health problems, in other words, get better through efforts to improve shared local conditions.
Beyond simply pinpointing scales of action--our social structures and environments--their study, at least by implication, opens up a much broader set of opportunities for local communities to act collaboratively to improve their health, such as improving access to parks, grocery stores, and otherwise acting through local communities to improve health that have the potential to be a lot cheaper, and a lot more effective, than a lot of traditional biomedical interventions.
(For a great review of some of the research on the effects of poverty on health, check out this <a href="https://kevishere.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/inequality-health-disparities-obesity/">recent blog post</a> from biological anthropologist Patrick Clarkin.)
Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:53:01 +0000Bradley Kreit3989 at http://member.iftf.orgCan I Have a Featherless Chicken and a Side of Healthy Bacon?http://member.iftf.org/node/3534
http://member.iftf.org/node/3534#commentsagriculturegenetic engineeringgeneticsgreen healthThe Future NowFood Futures Lab<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727680.300-altered-animals-creatures-with-bonus-features.html?full=true">The New Scientist</a> has a great round-up of the various efforts geneticists are undertaking to modify farm animals. The story doesn't break any new ground, per se, but it's remarkable for the sheer breadth of ways that genetic engineers are attempting to redesign animals. </p><p>
As the New Scientist describes it:
<blockquote>
[T]he genetic engineering of animals - with the exception of mice - has been a slow, tedious process needing a lot of money and not a little luck. Behind the scenes, though, a quiet revolution has been taking place. Thanks to a set of new tricks and tools, modifying animals is becoming a lot easier and more precise. That is not only going to transform research, it could also transform the meat and eggs you eat and the milk you drink....
At the same time, biologists have developed more efficient ways of adding DNA to cells, by hijacking natural genetic engineers such as viruses, and jumping genes capable of "copying and pasting" themselves. All these advances mean the effort and cost needed to produce GM animals has decreased a hundredfold.
</blockquote>
Here are just a few examples: </p><ul><li><a href="http://www.bio.org/animals/salmonmyths.asp">Salmon</a> that grow faster than their unmodified counterparts </li><li><a href="http://www.uoguelph.ca/enviropig/">Pigs</a> designed to produce less pollution</li><li>A separate species of <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8900-transgenic-pigs-are-rich-in-healthy-fats.html">pig</a> bred to have muscles full of healthier omega-3 fats</li><li><a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v23/n4/abs/nbt1078.html">Cattle</a> designed to be resistant to certain kinds of infections...</li></ul><p>&nbsp;</p>
The list goes on. A lot of the more novel uses of animal genetics, for example, have less to do with altering the animal to produce some sort of medical treatment for people. A group of researchers just found a way to <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=bite-me-new-malaria-proof-mosquito-2010-07-15">develop malaria-proof mosquitos</a> while in the world of farm animals, different researchers are attempting to find was to make pig organs safe to transplant into people.
These last examples--modifying animals to produce some sort of drug, organ or other medical treatments for people--are among the more innovative, and also, I'd guess, the most potentially disruptive to the food system, simply because of the new demands these could place on an already strained food system by diverting grains and land from food to breeding animals for medicine.
Of course, none of these animals have been brought into the food web just yet. The New Scientist echoed a point I've heard before: That these animals are most likely to be brought into the Chinese food system before making their way onto dinner plates in the United States or Europe, for reasons having to do with practical supply chain management questions as well as for reasons having to do with social values.
Which brings me to the last animal I want to mention: A <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/fluorescent-felines-meet-pre-plucked-chickens/6">featherless, pre-plucked chicken</a> that reduces the labor costs of plucking chicken.
The New Scientist included this in its slideshow of transgenic animals--and it was the only image that startled me and made me think: There's something I won't eat. The irony, though, was that it was the only animal in the slideshow that seems to have evolved simply through chance--a while ago, a chicken happened to mutate to not have feathers, and animal breeders are simply trying to figure out how to make the trait more prevalent.
It reminds me of a similar point I made <a href="http://www.iftf.org/node/3091">last year</a> when writing about lab-grown meat: The ultimate success of these animals will, in many ways, ultimately be tied to whether or not these animals seem like safe, healthy things to put into one's body.Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:27:33 +0000Bradley Kreit3534 at http://member.iftf.orgYour Diet--and Your Job--Could Benefit from a Walk in the Parkhttp://member.iftf.org/node/3392
http://member.iftf.org/node/3392#commentsgreen healthpersuasionself-controlThe Future NowHealth HorizonsTrouble resisting a late night dessert or shutting out distractions to finish up a project at work? The blog <a href="http://newvaluestreams.com/wordpress/?p=1133">New Value Streams</a> points to an interesting <a href="http://pps.sagepub.com/content/5/1/43.full.pdf+html">new study</a> suggesting a pretty simple solution to help with either problem: Go for a walk in a park or among some trees. In effect, directed attention--that is, the ability to focus intently and analytically--is a finite mental resource that appears to rely on many of the same mental processes as exerting self-control, that, when it's depleted, can cause us to make poor choices and have trouble focusing. But tuning out--heading out to a park, say, or by taking other mental breaks--we can regain the ability to self-regulate and focus.
The study, by Stephen Kaplan and Marc Berman of the University of Michigan, notes a growing body of research suggesting direct attention and self-regulation tax the same parts of our brains. For example, they note previous research has found that students taking standardized tests consistently score lower when trying to filter out noises and distractions but that these negative effects "only appear during the more difficult forms of information processing and do not worsen performance in general." Similarly, remembering long strings of numbers makes it difficult to "inhibit socially inappropriate responses" in much the same way it makes it difficult to <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703478704574612052322122442.html">turn down a slice of cake.</a>
Put differently, as Kaplan and Berman state, "self-regulation tends to put one's intention against one's inclination" and in much the same way that avoiding the cake requires ignoring tempting sites and smells, focusing intently requires ignoring other potentially enticing visual and mental stimuli.
Not surprisingly, taking a break from focusing can help restore attention and self-control. But according to Kaplan and Berman, three strategies seem to do the best at restoring this mechanism: sleep, meditation, and hanging out in natural environments, which they classify under the term Attention Restoration Therapy (ART). Natural environments, they note
<blockquote>
[U]tilize involuntary attention... so as not to interfere with other thoughts... Natural environments, such as parks, gardens, and lakefronts, are able to capture involuntary attention without monopolizing attentional channel capacity... Natural environments are certainly not the only environments capable of attracting involuntary attention without interfering with other thoughts, but do serve as good candidate environments that have been shown to restore directed attention abilities across a wide array of populations and situations....
ART would appear to offer the potential to contribute in a wide variety of contexts. It offers an intervention with no known side effects that can be taken in a wide range of dosages. Initial studies have shown this approach to be elpful in treating a broad range of psychological problems, from information processing limitations, to aggression, to recovering from the disturbing cognitive side effects of cancer.
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Of course, their research doesn't mean that a simple walk through the park can solve our <a href="http://www.iftf.org/node/3217">considerable self-control difficulties.</a> But I do think the next time I'm having trouble concentrating, I'm going to try to take a walk in the park. It sounds like it will do a lot more to help me think than would reading a newspaper or checking out twitter.Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:08:47 +0000Bradley Kreit3392 at http://member.iftf.orgHelping others see the pollution you hearhttp://member.iftf.org/node/3314
http://member.iftf.org/node/3314#commentseco-monitoringenvironmentgreen healthnoise pollutionHealth Horizons<p>As part of our ongoing work examining the intersection of health and citizen-environmental monitoring, we are always on the look out for new products and services that promote this connection.</p>
<p>One story that we have used frequently as a signal is <a href="http://peir.cens.ucla.edu/">PEIR</a>, the Personal Environmental Impact Report project run by UCLA, which allows people to use their mobile phones to explore and share their impact on the environment and how the environment impacts them. Another is Squirrel, from Calit2, a mobile air pollution monitor (read about it <a href="http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=1080">here</a>).</p>
<p>But in addition to air pollution, noise pollution is a regular—and disruptive—part of daily life in a city, resulting from traffic to construction to every day chatter (made worse by the prevalence of people talking on their cell phones). Now we have two projects—<a href="http://www.noisetube.net/">NoiseTube</a> and <a href="http://www.lhrnoisemap.org/projectbriefing.html">LHR NoiseMap</a>—that use mobile phones to record and map instances of noise pollution.</p><p><span class="inline inline-center"><img src="http://www.iftf.org/files/images/noisetubelogo.png" alt="" title="" class="image image-preview " width="184" height="70" /></span></p>
<p>As <a href="http://mobileactive.org/whats-sound-two-tools-track-noise-pollution">described by MobileActive.org</a>:
<blockquote>NoiseTube uses crowd-sourcing to monitor noise pollution. Users with GPS-enabled phones can install a free application that measures the noise level wherever they are. Users tag the recordings with a description of the noise, its source, the time of day, and other criteria, and the data is then mapped onto GoogleEarth; in this way participants can use their phones as noise sensors to automatically share information about their city with other members of the community.</blockquote>
</p>
<p>Based in Paris, NoiseTube's numbers are small—only 112 users spread over 25 cities. The LHR NoiseMap, which uses AudioBoo, an iPhone audio blogging application, to record the sounds of airplanes coming in and out of London’s Heathrow airport and the effect the noise has on the surrounding neighborhoods, has even fewer participants. It is essentially a one-man show. An interview with LHR NoiseMap developer, however, reveals the potential of both of these projects:</p>
<blockquote>“Noise can be measured, you have a microphone on every phone. You can create an audio map, [with a] crowd-sourced, participatory approach using mobiles and mapping open street maps.”</blockquote>
<p>While NoiseTube and LHR NoiseMap are in their infancy, they rely on readily available technology to measure and map noise pollution. If a critical mass of people become regular users in a given location, meaningful amounts of useful information will be generated. Imagine a neighborhood that has complained of noise from the local airport to no avail. Local citizens will now be able to easily and accurately document the problem and, armed with actionable data, hopefully be able to effect change.</p>
<p>I can't resist wrapping up this post with an Artifact from the Future that my colleague, Jason Tester, created for our Green Health Conference in 2008. Our report on the Greening of Health is now available <a href="http://www.iftf.org/node/3191>here.</a> </p>
<span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.iftf.org/files/images/biocitizen_air monitor_lg.preview.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-preview " width="425" height="410" /></span>
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:04:19 +0000Vivian Distler3314 at http://member.iftf.orgHospital food—not so yucky any morehttp://member.iftf.org/node/3054
http://member.iftf.org/node/3054#commentsfoodgreen healthhospitalsnutritionorganic foodsustainabilityHealth Horizons<p>
Rarely does one hear about tasty—let alone healthy—hospital food. That's about to change at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, located adjacent to Palo Alto, California. Yesterday, the Hospital <a href="http://stanfordhospital.org/farmfresh/news/" target="_blank">announced</a> <span style="color: #000000">the launch of a new inpatient menu that will feature organic, locally grown, sustainable ingredients. The <a href="http://stanfordhospital.org/farmfresh/introducing/" target="_blank">initiative</a> was developed with local chef/restaurateur <a href="http://www.cooleatz.com/about/jesseziffcool.htm" target="_blank">Jesse Cool</a>, who has been a leader in healthy eating and sustainable food practices for decades. (With apologies to chef Cool for a comparison she probably has heard too many times and may not appreciate, when I first moved to Palo Alto from Berkeley, my impression was that Jesse Cool was the <a href="http://www.chezpanisse.com/about/alice-waters/" target="_blank">Alice Waters</a> of the area, and that her landmark restaurant, the <a href="http://www.cooleatz.com/flea-st-cafe/index.html" target="_blank">Flea Street Cafe</a>, was the <a href="http://www.chezpanisse.com/about/chez-panisse/" target="_blank">Chez Panisse</a> of the Peninsula.) </span>
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<span class="inline inline-left"><img src="/files/images/farm%20fresh%20with%20jesse%20cool.jpg" class="image image-preview" height="174" width="210" /></span>
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<span style="color: #000000">Stanford Hospital, in recognizing the vital connection between serving healthy food and</span><span style="color: #000000"> helping &quot;patients heal as quickly as possible,&quot; has put itself </span><span style="color: #000000">at the forefront of an emerging trend. The Farm Fresh program </span><span style="color: #000000"></span>
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<span style="color: #000000">debuts as groups ranging from the American Medical Association to the American Nurses Association have recently established policies to encourage hospitals and other health care facilities to serve patients healthier and ecologically sustainable foods with natural high nutritional quality. The American Public Health Association has also endorsed a similar policy.</span>
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<span style="color: #000000">Cool, a dedicated advocate of organic food, grown locally with sustainable farming techniques, worked with the hospital's executive chef to develop what might be described as a 200 Mile Diet (a play on the <a href="http://100milediet.org/" target="_blank">100 Mile Diet movement</a>). </span>
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<span style="color: #000000">The ingredients for Stanford Hospital’s Farm Fresh meals will primarily come from growers and producers within a 200-mile radius of Stanford Medical Center, based on seasonal availability. Among the items featured will be vegetables from local farms, olive oil from Napa Valley, strawberries from Watsonville, organic dairy from Petaluma, pasture raised range chickens and grass-fed range beef from Marin and Sonoma, and whole grain bread from a San Francisco bakery. </span>
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Although I have never been to Flea Street Cafe, I have eaten at Jesse Cool's other establishments, and I can vouch for the quality, freshness, and tastiness of her food. So as much as I hope to not be a Stanford Hospital patient again any time soon, if for some reason I do end up there, at least I can look forward to a good meal.
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Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:57:26 +0000Vivian Distler3054 at http://member.iftf.orgAsthma Alerts Through Social Networkshttp://member.iftf.org/node/2763
http://member.iftf.org/node/2763#commentsair pollutiongreen healthHC2020-TransformationHealth HorizonsArizona public health researchers are looking into <a href="http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/291530">updating asthma patients</a> about environmental pollution through Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms. Under the proposal, Arizona residents could register with a publicly run program and receive updates about pollution and other environmental triggers for asthma that have been culled from environmental sensors.
State officials say they expect an alert system would cost several hundred thousand dollars to create and could be developed within two years. Though that sounds like an unnecessarily long amount of time to develop an alert system, it sounds like a creative way to deliver timely information to help people plan their days to avoid asthma attacks.
Tue, 05 May 2009 23:23:08 +0000Bradley Kreit2763 at http://member.iftf.orgThe Green Hospitalhttp://member.iftf.org/node/2684
http://member.iftf.org/node/2684#commentsgreen healthHC2020-TransformationsustainabilityHealth HorizonsWe've been looking into <a href="/node/928">Green Health</a> for a while now, so it's nice to see this<a href="http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2009/03/hospital_rooms_go_green_1.html"> Boston Globe</a> item on an experimental design for the green hospital room. Designed to be both sustainable and cost-effective and pictured below.
<span class="inline inline-left"><img src="/files/images/greenroom.img_assist_custom.JPG" class="image image-img_assist_custom" height="143" width="215" /></span>
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The hospital room also features:
<blockquote>
Low flow faucets. Flooring made with renewable materials. Non-toxic items make up the ceiling, bed and walls. There is even a balcony to connect to nature because research shows it can help with healing.
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Anshen + Allen, International Facility Management Association designed the facility. In addition to building the room to be sustainable, they also built additional space to make the room accessible for patient families and friendlier to try to help patients feel better.
Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:21:35 +0000Bradley Kreit2684 at http://member.iftf.orgClimate change and public healthhttp://member.iftf.org/node/2341
http://member.iftf.org/node/2341#commentsdiseasegreen healthHC2020-Collapsepublic healthHealth Horizons<p>
This Reuters headline--&quot;<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081007/sc_nm/us_climate_health" target="_blank">Climate change seen aiding spread of deadly diseases</a>&quot;--brought back memories of our Green Health map and conference. In 2003, the World Health Organization published a <a href="http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/cchhsummary/en/" target="_blank">report</a> on climate change as a significant and emerging threat to public health, noting that many important diseases (such as malaria and dengue, as well as malnutrition and diarrhea) are highly sensitive to changing temperatures
and precipitation.
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<p>
Now, the <a href="http://www.wcs.org/" target="_blank">Wildlife Conservation Society</a> has issued a list of a &quot;deadly dozen&quot; diseases (avian flu, tick-borne babesia, cholera, ebola, parasites, plague, lyme disease, red tides of algal blooms, Rift Valley fever, sleeping sickness, tuberculosis, and yellow fever) that are likely to spread because of climate change. The head of the Society observes,
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
&quot;Even minor disturbances can have far reaching consequences on what diseases wild animals might encounter and transmit as climate changes. . . . The term 'climate change' conjures images of melting ice caps and rising sea levels that threaten coastal cities and nations, but <i>just as important is how increasing temperatures and fluctuating precipitation levels will change the distribution of dangerous pathogens</i>.&quot;(my emphasis)
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<p>
This is an often overlooked ramification of climate change, but one that we are certainly aware is on the horizon.
</p>
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:00:00 +0000Vivian Distler2341 at http://member.iftf.orgCitizen Science meets art in San Franciscohttp://member.iftf.org/node/1491
http://member.iftf.org/node/1491#commentscitizen sciencegreen healthmobile healthHealth HorizonsMobile Health Last weekend, an artist-run organization called <a href="http://soex.org/index.html">Southern Exposure</a> (SoEx) held a hands-on workshop in San Francisco that invited people to &quot;[j]oin a team of researchers, artists, and practitioners in a citizen based participatory field study.&quot; Participants took part in &quot;collecting, gathering, and analyzing the urban environment in [the city] using a collection of mobile, networked sensors called sensr: citizen science * air quality. The various sensors measure CO (Carbon Monoxide), NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), ozone, sulfur dioxide, moisture, uv, light, decible, and temperature.&quot;
[img_assist|nid=979|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=212|height=165]Organizers <a href="http://soex.org/Event/158.html">explained</a> that the data would be downloaded and &quot;discussed in a brainstorm session asking what was discovered, and exploring how we would like to see this information used or changed to make a better city. Ultimately, Common Sense senses our natural environment and empowers collective action through everyday grassroots citizen science across blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and nations.&quot;
Common Sense (see image) is a project of workshop leader <a href="http://soex.org/currentexhibitions.html">Vapor</a>.
<blockquote>
Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work. Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies – sensors, databases, and communications equipment – that are only recently accessible outside a lab. . . .
Vapor proposes new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions. . . .
Many projects in this exhibition have an off-site component so . . . [visitors are encouraged] to stop by the gallery to check out a bicycle as part of Futurefarmers Public Cycle, a Preemptive Media AIR device to measure the CO in the area, or one of Natalie Jeremijenko's Clear Skies mask to monitor the real effects of pollution [they] move through the city.
</blockquote>
For more details about these projects, visit the Vapor <a href="http://soex.org/currentexhibitions.html">website</a>. The exhibit runs through May 3, 2008. I think I might organize a Health Horizons field trip to check it out.
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:42:13 +0000Vivian Distler1491 at http://member.iftf.org